hey everyone. I'm a former windows user and I made the switch to Ubuntu. unfortunately, I didn't get very far berfore I hit a small problem; after trying to enable desktop effects and installing the needed nVidia driver, ubuntu looks more like ms-dos than it does win. Vista...

First of all, go back to the ubuntu websites and start reading their documentation. There is certainly a howto describing what you have to do to get nvida&compiz running. If you still have problems after that, tell us exactly what kind of problems. Also as root (or with that sudo crap) run nvidia-bug-report.sh. Just open a shell like konsole and run it. Post the output here.